The next book in the Broncosaurus Rex world will be Dinosaurs That Never Were, a monster manual featuring dinosaurs that could have evolved on earth, but didn't. Instead, they evolved in Storm Valley. The book covers around 50 of these fantasy dinos, plus a little bit of history on Storm Valley.

After that, we have two other ideas lined up for future books: one on Union ironclads, and the other on big game hunters.

Thank you, Mr. Author! I wrote the "Dinosaurs That Never Were" and "Big Game Hunter" books, and always appreciate more work. Actually, Joseph Goodman and I will be cooperating in a collection of Ice Age animals in the future "Tusk Wars" supplement. This will consist of actual animals of the Pleistocene, with a few Pliocene ones added for good measure, but if you---and enough other fans---want a collection of fictional beasts, I'll be happy to put it out. The same goes for creatures evolved from, say, the mammallike reptiles that ruled Earth from the Upper Permian to the Lower Triassic, the odd invertebrates found in the Burgess Shale, the thecodonts and primitive dinosaurs from the Upper Triassic, and the archaic mammals and birds from the first half of the Cenozoic Era. My lists of contingency creatures even include another collection of alternate dinosaurs, this time from an Earth with a partial "Great Extinction". In it, the large dinosaurs---sauropods, carnosaurs, duckbills, ankylosaurs, etc.---went extinct, but the relatively small ones survived. The new fauna would have large and small animals alike, evolved from a root stock consisting of the raptor-type carnivores, the hypsilophodonts, most of the boneheads, the ostrich dinosaurs, etc. Even the ceratopsians and nodosaurs will survive, thanks to small animals such as Microceratops and Minmi, and the nodosaurs will evolve to recreate the ankylosaurs as well. Will any of these collections see print? It depends on all you people reading it; Joseph can only afford to print this stuff up if he can be sure that lots of you will be willing to buy it. Be sure and let him know.

Tusk Wars will be Broncosaurus Rex all the way. Although Joseph and I will be splitting up the prehistoric mammals and birds between us, he'll be monopolizing all the elephant species, which will be made intelligent and aggressive (hence the title "Tusk Wars") a la the raptors and other dinosaurs in the main rulebook. A valley of Ice Age creatures has already been briefly mentioned in the main rulebook; "Tusk Wars" will be the supplement that fleshes it out, just as "Dinosaurs That Never Were" will flesh out Storm Valley.

Oh, and for those of you who enjoy guns, especially those who like custom-made weapons, the "Big Game Hunters" sourcebook will be for you. Although it has Cretasus-oriented stuff, most of it can be used in any d20 campaign setting. You'll LOVE the equipment chapter! Aside a long list of mostly hunting-related real firearms, like the Winchester 45/70, Sharps "Big Fifty", .505 Gibbs, and Holland & Holland .375, I've got a section dedicated for the machinists and those PCs who are wealthy enough to have customized firearms built. Note that this is even partly historical, as many of the great British rifle companies produced custom-made weapons for their own wealthy customers.

The customization section starts out with a listing of guns of various historical tech levels. According to Joseph's listing of tech levels, the lowest one with guns at all covers firearms from matchlock arquebuses to Kentucky rifles and Brown Bess muskets. Next comes "break-open" single-shot and double-barrelled rifles, plus revolvers (the only repeating firearms in this section are rifles with revolver chambers, which exist both in the game system and in real life). Finally, we have everything else, from bolt-, lever-, and pump-action repeating firearms to semiautomatic and automatic weapons. The listing of regular guns will have a wide variety of pistols, muskets/rifles, and shotguns, with a glossary of gun terms to explain everything to those non-NRA members out there.

Now for the good part. Machinists in various colonies, "lost" or otherwise, will be making firearms for their neighbors to make up for a lack of traders coming in, and some may be restricted to various tech levels. Every historical rifle or shotgun type---12 gauge, .22 Magnum, etc.---will be put on a basic table covering stats and prices for a single-shot, break-open weapon. This is followed by a listing of options, each with its own price, which you can use when figuring out the price of your custom-made firearm. Want a magazine weapon? Fine, just pay for it, the amount of money you shell out determining the capacity of the magazine. Want a repeater? Then pay for that as well. For those of you interested in initiative issues, pump-action guns work slightly faster than bolt- or lever-action ones, but are less accurate and reliable. By contrast, bolt-action rifles are the most accurate and reliable, but the slowest-working, while lever-action guns are in the middle in all categories. Of course, in our gaming universe, we've included a stabilizer that will make pump-action guns just as accurate as any other---IF you're willing to pay the price.

There are plenty of accessories you can buy, such as telescopic, laser, and sonic gunsights, muzzle brakes (for increased power and accuracy), silencers, flash suppressors, etc. The stock magazine will be a big hit, I think. Imagine a strip of cloth or leather the length of a shotgun or rifle stock, covered on one side with Velcro and on the other with loops for 6-8 (or more) shotgun slugs or rifle cartridges. Load the thing up, slap it on the stock, and you have an emergency supply of ammo with you at all times. And yes, you can put one of these things on each side of the stock at the same time. And if you have a clip-fed firearm, we have the Redi-Mag, which fastens itself to the clip-feed section of your gun. This thing holds TWO magazines at once, and when the first is empty, just drop it and slide the other one in place, saving reloading time early in a firefight. You could even use a variant with batteries instead of clips for energy weapons.

If you want to pay the money for it, you can even have literally "tailor-made" rifles made. In this historical case, you either send your measurements and stats to the gunmaker or go yourself to be thoroughly measured and weighed, and he crafts a firearm designed to be handled by a person of your exact height, weight, arm length, etc. Depending on which method you use, this can give a +1 or +2 increase in accuracy, but only if the gun is being handled by you or an identical twin. It's like having a magical weapon that only grants bonuses in combat for one wielder.

Lower tech firearms can be modified as well, but be careful. A revolver variant in the musket age means having multiple BARRELS on the gun, each of which must be rotated in place. There are also historical breechloaders, but the metallurgy of those times was so primitive that a lot of the propulsive gases leaked out the breech, so you increase rate of fire this way only at the cost of range and hitting power.

The treasure section details costs of sample Earth animal trophies---lion heads, bearskin rugs, etc.---as well as items such as rings and items useful on safari, such as collapsible bathtubs. Finally, there's a section on the duties and problems associated with the job of great white hunter, as well as a list of scenarios. The book will come out next year, and remember that you can use the bulk of the stuff in it on any world or planet. There are plenty of mundane animals in the D&D rules already, and the less-fancy monsters will make good faunas for other planets. Imagine a world where the vertebrates have six limbs, for instance. This could give you wildlife such as dragons, harpies, gargoyles, griffins, hippogriffs, pegasi, etc. Look for it when it comes out!

Another thing I wanna see is more stuff on the desert. Some real dirt about the Leptoceratops would be cool.

Oh, yeah, and I hadta design the interior of that ship (and the exterior) there on my own...I think I got down to around 40 decks, but my players ended up skipping most of it. Of course, they (the PCs)couldn't figure out how anything worked, not knowing how digital tech functioned (and the players never caught on either, not until the end).

And again, I vote for more valleys. What about a valley where rats are the dominant life form? Or bats (did this in one of my worlds)? Or a truly bizarre organism, such as trichordates or echinoderms (heck, I'll write that!)?

And "Dinosaurs That Never Were" for April? You been planning for my birthday?

Well, the Broncosaurus Rex rulebook gives us 20 valleys to start with. After that, how about making the interior of Cretasus a subterranean world with gigantic caverns instead of valleys? We could have cavern/valleys in complete darkness (there's a spot for your bat world), in which all creatures navigate by feelers, echo-location, etc., water-filled caverns with new forms of aquatic life, and caverns lit by phosphorescent rocks or algae, possibly heated by volcanic vents. Remembering that Cretasus is about the size of Jupiter, that should keep the world-designers like me busy for years to come. Also don't forget the possibility of other planets being discovered and included in the game system, like the world the safari outfit Blue Pygmy dominates, filled with dinosaur-sized giant insects. And since in real life, such creatures could only survive on a world with extremely low gravity, think of all the neat rules one could put in for how far a jump, a leap, or a single step can take you on this world?

The B-Rex sourcebook I would love to see is one on cavemen - Cro-Magnon, Neandertal, and so on. The Discovery Channel ran some really cool specials on them not too long along, including some "what if" stuff on how the Neandertal race might've evolved if we li'l homo sapiens hadn't knocked them right out of existence. Love to see what the "native" humans of Cretasus are like.

Most of the carnosaurs had small arms, so having them all lose them eventually seemed like one way to go. When you get the actual book, you'll find that the modified carnosaurs come in two types: armless "linnorms" like the dragons of Norse mythology, and creatures with longer and more powerful arms than their real-life counterparts. And yes, I think they all had a chance to evolve; there's nothing in the book that requires magic or high-tech human or alien intervention.

And now, in the Great Minds Think Alike category, I've just made a discovery of interest for those lovers of new dinosaurs. In the latest issue of the magazine Prehistoric Times, I came across an article on a group that has a website dedicated to an alternate Earth where the dinosaurs survived. Aside from listing new species, they even cover evolution and the Earth's geological history throughout the Cenozoic Era. And NO, I didn't mine the site for ideas; I finished the draft for "Dinosaurs That Never Were" over six months ago, while I didn't learn of this website until last Saturday and wasn't able to access it until the day after. You'll get plenty of new species, but you'll have to provide your own stats for them. The web address is http://specdinos.0catch.com/

Any updates on when Tusk Wars or Big Game Hunters will come out? I already have Dinos that never were pre-ordered, but want to know when the next books will come out.

Also, any clue when we might see a preview of the art or material which will be in both books? I've loved just about every preview you've posted Joseph, even when all you have is a table of contents and a few pieces of art.

Tusk Wars is on hold, so I can't give you anything firm on that. As for Big Game Hunters, I'll say tentatively maybe within the next 6 months or so, but, again, don't quote me on that. Previews for sure once things are more finalized...

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